This invention relates to a method and apparatus for treating waste materials including solids, liquids and gases. More specifically, this invention relates to a flash reactor for separating harmful chemicals from exhaust gases and for cooling the exhaust gases before emitting same into the atmosphere.
The treatment and disposal of man's waste and discard has become one of the major problems of this technological era. In the past, solid waste has primarily been dumped in land fills, however, because of contamination of adjacent streams and lakes resulting from seepage and runoff of decomposed garbage and other materials and because the value of land is increasing while land suitable for land fill operation is becoming scarce, new techniques for efficiently disposing of the increasing mass of solid waste generated by our society are required. One approach to the disposal of solid waste, as well as sanitary waste and other similar materials, lies in the combined and interrelated treatment of all such materials in a single plant. Thus, techniques have been invented, such as disclosed in copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 291,029, filed Sept. 21, 1972, issued 5/28/74 as U.S. Pat. No. 3,812,794, which describes a method and apparatus for disposing of solid waste material by incineration. Such incineration techniques, however, have resulted in the generation of environmentally undesirable by-products such as hot gases which include harmful chemicals such as sulfur, chlorine and other such gases. Accordingly, there is a need for a method or apparatus for appropriately extracting such harmful chemicals from the exhaust gases of the incinerator before the exhaust gases are emitted into the open atmosphere. Further, because of the potentially damaging influence of hot gases on the environment, it is also highly desirable to provide a convenient and economical means for cooling the gases before they are emitted into the atmosphere.
Further, the efficient disposal of sanitary waste such as sewage has become an increasing problem. Typically, the santitary waste is collected and transported to a sewage treatment plant which separates the organic material, dissolves solids and kills the germs within the sewage. The cost of removing the organic material and the dissolved solids from the raw sewage has increased because as attempts are made to remove an increasing percentage of polluting materials from sewage water, the cost increases rapidly. Further attempts to remove all of the polluting materials from the sewage water by mechanical or chemical processes have proven quite difficult. All of these processes produce a sediment or sludge which must be treated and disposed of in some manner. It, therefore, is desirable to provide an efficient method and apparatus for processing liquid sanitary waste.
In copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 473,676, filed May 28, 1974 and entitled EVAPORATOR CONDENSER UNIT, now U.S. Pat. No. 3,930,960, a method and apparatus is disclosed for efficiently extracting potable water from hot exhaust gases and liquid sanitary waste. In addition, this application discloses a method and apparatus for effectively cooling hot exhaust gases. However, it does not disclose means for separating harmful chemicals from hot exhaust gases and for flash drying the particulate matter in liquid sanitary waste liquid and for separating the particulate matter from both the hot gases and the sanitary waste.
It therefore is an object of this invention to provide a method and apparatus for cooling and separating harmful chemicals from hot exhaust gases.
It is another object of this invention to provide a method and apparatus for cooling hot exhaust gases and flash drying the particulate matter in sanitary waste liquid.